Religion Dispatches
…his arms. Ophiuchus has long been part of sidereal astrology (dominant in India, among other places), but absent from the traditionally twelve-signed tropical system most popular with American newspapers until now, with the revised map of the night sky and its influence on human destiny. Just as the revision of the Zodiac had induced popular outcry—people who had long self-identified as melodramatically emotional Pisces were suddenly told, for in…
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…drives the money changers from the Temple. For centuries, many temples in India functioned like banks, making interest-bearing loans. Commercialized forms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s…
Read More…umerous awards including Best Film at the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India and Best Documentary at Turin LGBT Film Festival. The film explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in several different countries, portraying jihad not as a holy war but as a struggle to reconcile one’s faith with one’s sexuality. The film doesn’t feature experts or religious scholars, but rather individual women and men who are trying to find their place in a f…
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…the war. My mother’s family (which is, immediately speaking, from northern India) is supposedly descended from an Iraqi who left Mesopotamia around 1250. In Indo-Islamic culture, among others, we have shajaras, literally (family) trees. That’s how we know. This fortunate ancestor (being Arab) spoke Arabic, so he found employment in the service of the Delhi Sultans, and the family line was from then on inseparable from Islamic law, arts and letters…
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…) I knew Monsanto sues farmers into oblivion, caused a rash of suicides in India, suppresses negative media coverage, and pays politicians, and scientists to lie on its behalf. But there was one story I didn’t believe, because I knew it wasn’t true: Monsanto hadn’t paid me. So I did what any academic or journalist would do, and started learning more about the company that supposedly had me on its payroll. In the process, I discovered that very lit…
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…sibilities opened up by a more cosmopolitan empire and an enriched Muslim-Hindian synthesis. If he worried about anything, Lévi-Strauss worried about false dichotomies. He was interested in the hyphens that bind, not the selves that divide. Fascinated as he was by the mental structures the human mind imposes on reality as it attempts to make order and sense, he was not as simplistic a dichotomist as some of his critics believed. Binary logic is th…
Read More…when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” A native of India, Mr. Sen had saved enough money to open a small copy shop. While he had no family in the U.S., he had friends and associates who were part of this new life. While he was a Hindu, Sen had a Muslim roommate with whom he frequently discussed matters of belief. And when they did, Mr. Sen expressed his deep disappointment that there was so much violence in the world on acc…
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…ned their wealth in complicity with the violent British colonial regime in India alongside questions about her lifestyle and motivations? Wouldn’t it be logical to ask what bolstered her lavish lifestyle of private flights and endless parties and fundraisers? And what, exactly, her wealth did?Remember, this is a show that has clearly demonstrated its concern over climate change, to which the wealthy disproportionately contribute (even as they’re l…
Read More…st Africans studying Qur’an—and speaking Turkish. Tourists from Indonesia, India, Egypt, and other Muslim societies, finding in Istanbul a cultural touchstone, an inspiring mix of the modern and the pious, challenging the traditional players in the politics of Islamic practice. They all come here for a reason; the visibility of Islamic practice a far cry from where the country was even two decades ago. Turkey offers something fellow Muslim nations…
Read More…oses. I witnessed another example of “swastika-phobia” on a trip to Kochi, India, once home to a sizable population of Indian Jews, a part of which is still known as “Jew Town.” I overheard an American tourist exclaim with alarm, “I was in Jew Town, and there were swastikas everywhere!” When her friend tried to explain that in Kochi the swastika is a symbol of Hinduism and not Nazism, she responded, “I know, but still!” Because the swastika inspir…
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